Martínez's “Ecclesiology” is “Splayed on our bed, your arms are cruciate splendor, blazing;/my kisses, the fourteen stations.” In this secular church of intimacy, not only have the lovers re-consecrated religious imagery into sexual passion (“Your rose window seduces the heavenly light. Your back arcs,/moves heavenward”), but they have committed society's “sin” of gay love.

A brief counterpoint (“Crime Scene”) brings this to street level. “With righteous chalk/They've marked the place/Where it ended suddenly./There on the scarred sidewalk./A few stop to ponder and gawk/At the outline of two men/Locked in a fast embrace.”

It is insufficient to limit this remarkable book to the annals of gay or Latino literature. Since these realities have been long ignored or derided, and his lyric voice represents otherness authentically, the strongest poems reflect this consciousness. “A Map of Aztlan” bleeds mythology into reality — from Albuquerque to El Paso to Los Angeles to San Antonio, and finally Mexico, where “The innocence of a thousand/Juárez girls float/at the water's edge,/where duck bills scythe unceasingly,/ and a brace of egrets waits, patient/for startled schools to reconvene.”

“Uncle Ernest” (Thomas' 20th book) carries an epigraph by Theodore Roethke. (“What's madness but nobility of soul/at odds with circumstance?”) The narrator visits the heart of darkness without flinching, suggesting that we might all be capable of doing what Ernest has done, if we had been deprived of humanizing influences. He ends up in an asylum, where the most graphic scenes startle. In “Windowsill,” Ernest sits in “the garish light/of purest science,” observing “the row of jars/on the cousin's windowsill,/ the jars of hearts,/the perfect,/pickled hearts/of little sparrows.”

Roberto Bonazzi's most recent book of poems is “The Scribbling Cure” (Pecan Grove). He can be reached at latitudes international@gmail.com.